Free Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr by Robert Hofler Page A

escaped New York City to accept his first acting gig, in the Neil Simon movie Murder by Death at Columbia Pictures. Back on the East Coast, Capote enjoyed leper status after spilling a bunch of society beans in Esquire magazine about Babe Paley and other members of the Park Avenue world. An early look at one of the chapters, “La Cote Basque 1965,” from his long-awaited but never-delivered novel, Answered Prayers, had won him no praise among the literary set and lost him entrée to the Beautiful People, as they were known. One of them, Mrs. William Woodward Jr., found herself so unraveled by “La Cote Basque” that she committed suicide on October 10, seven days before the offending Esquire issue hit the stands. In a rare gesture of discretion, Capote resorted to using a pseudonym, Ann Hopkins, for Woodward, whom the 13,000-word short story accused of tricking Mr. Woodward into marriage and then murdering him “after he got the goods on her and threatened divorce,” as gossip doyenne Liz Smith revealed in her syndicated column. Other society types who were maligned without the benefit of pseudonyms included the Duchess of Windsor, Princess Margaret, Gloria Vanderbilt, Babe Paley, Mrs. Joshua Logan, and the late Joe Kennedy.
    Capote may have been considered infamously outré on his home turf, but on the night of December 14 in the old Lincoln Heights Jail, he remained a literary genius with people who read Liz Smith but not Esquire or In Cold Blood .
It didn’t matter. Allan knew that the L.A. crowd had seen the movie version of his best seller, and besides, who among them were starring in a Neil Simon movie?
    “This isn’t one of those ‘come to a party’ parties,” Allan claimed. Translation: Allan demanded that his guests dress up, play a role, act like somebody . To goose things along, Allan occasionally called out to let the “prisoners” know who had just arrived to have his or her photograph taken. “Peter Sellers is being mugged with the dog Won Ton Ton! Go and watch!” he brayed.
    For those who had already watched Lucille Ball and Charles Bronson and David Niven and Christopher Isherwood and Princess Toumanoff and Diana Ross and Francesco Scavullo and Margaux Hemingway being mug-shot, the Doo Dah Gang’s boys and girls conducted tours of the nearby gas chamber as the Linc, a five-piece chamber music group, played old favorites like “Jailhouse Rock” and “Killing Me Softly with His Song.”
    “I always knew I’d end up in jail,” said Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger.
    “I bet I’m the only one who’s been here legitimately—500 times,” cracked The Onion Field author Joseph Wambaugh, a former cop.
    At last, Truman Capote himself stepped out of the prison elevator wearing overly tinted specs and a gangster-ish mix of big-brimmed black Borsalino, double-breasted tuxedo, and what he called “my Brazilian dancing shoes,” which sported red leather and rubber soles. Allan’s Hollywood Reporter friend Richard Hach played chauffeur for the night, and picked up Capote at his Malibu rental (the writer had recently bolted Mrs. Johnny Carson’s place in Beverly Hills) to bring him across town to the jail. “I was an old friend of Truman’s and Allan wanted to know Truman,” says Hach, identifying the raison d’être for many Allan Carr get-togethers.
    Capote tried to downplay his expulsion from New York City. “Oh, I just thought it would be fun to do something different,” he said of starring in Murder by Death. Like Allan’s jailhouse party, the movie played off Capote’s sleuth status, care of In Cold Blood, and cast him as an eccentric millionaire who invites five detectives to his house to solve a murder. “I probably won’t act again. It was just for a change from working on the book, and I knew I didn’t have time to take a vacation.”
    If anyone asked about his “La Cote Basque 1965” contretemps, he told them not to worry. “Carole Matthau and Gloria Vanderbilt